Developing Your Program’s Substance Misuse Minor/Concentration

ABSTRACT

A meaningful body of literature promotes greater exposure of social work students to educational content concerning substance misuse. This EndNotes piece identifies the rationale for social work programs to develop undergraduate minors and graduate concentrations in this area. We provide suggestions for social work educators and program administrators developing a substance misuse minor, concentration, or course sequence appropriate to their state and student population. Steps taken at our institution to accomplish this mission are presented in hopes of shortening the time and effort others expend. Capitalizing on emerging models and evidence for educating social work students about substance-related practices, our experience has been a considerable increase in university-wide enrollment in such courses and enhancement of the state’s professional workforce trained in this area.

KEYWORDS:

• substance misuse concentration
• substance misuse minor
• addiction curriculum
• substance misuse curriculum
• substance abuse curriculum

There exists a meaningful body of literature spanning decades that promotes greater exposure of social work students to educational content concerning substance use, substance misuse, substance use disorders, and recovery (see Senreich & Straussner, 2013). An oft-cited rationale is that, regardless of practice level, service delivery system, problem domain, populations served, and geographical region, social workers encounter challenges directly or indirectly related to substance misuse – whether in the lives of those with whom they work or in the contexts where many physical, mental, behavioral, and economic health and safety concerns exist. The need for greater educational content and preparation concerning substance misuse is increasingly addressed through evidence-supported train-the-trainers efforts (e.g., see Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions volume 18; Lundgren et al., 2018), professional organizations (e.g., Association for Multidisciplinary Education and Research in Substance Use and Addiction; Council on Social Work Education; Society for Social Work and Research; Research Society on Alcoholism; National Association of Social Workers credential for Certified Clinical Alcohol, Tobacco & Other Drugs Social Worker), training and workforce development grants (e.g., Council on Social Work Education’s 2-year Practitioner Education grant funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in 2019), and development of curriculum tools (e.g., National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s 2003 curriculum for social work education for the prevention and treatment of alcohol use disorders; Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), 2020).

Having been involved for many years with various efforts to help shape future social workers’ knowledge, skills, and values concerning substance misuse and recovery support, we are excited to have received multiple queries about how social work programs might build undergraduate and/or graduate course sequences in this topic area. This Endpage piece aims to support social work educators and program administrators in developing a substance misuse minor, concentration, or course sequence appropriate to their state and student population.

To address these requests for guidance, we identify steps taken at our institution to accomplish this mission in hopes of shortening the time and effort others expend. The context for initiating our programs’ efforts to develop such a course sequence included a confluence between the goals of: (1) increasing university-wide enrollment in social work courses, (2) expanding and enhancing the state’s professional workforce trained in this area, and (3) capitalizing on emerging models and evidence for educating social work students about substance-related practices. We began with the idea of creating an interdisciplinary minor for undergraduate students that would allow them to meet our state’s educational requirements for a professional license in substance misuse/chemical dependency counseling, regardless of their major, and expose students to a social work perspective on the knowledge, skills, values, and issues presented (Straussner & Senreich, 2002). (Students still need to meet practice hour and examination requirements for state licensure/certification.) The undergraduate minor sequence eventually sparked the interest of graduate social work students who strongly requested (insisted on) a parallel opportunity at the MSW program level. In response, we recently redesigned the sequence as an undergrad/grad student package.

Steps in course sequence development

Broad environmental scan

We began with a qualitative review of titles and brief descriptions for every course in our university’s course catalog and engaged in interviews with department and/or advising leadership in many departments across campus (e.g., education, pharmacy, psychology, sociology/criminal justice, women’s gender and sexuality studies, and others). In the end we identified only a small number of courses that specifically addressed alcohol or other substance use, misuse, use disorders, abuse, or addiction as a primary or significant focus. Through this process, we gauged a high degree of support from these colleges/departments/programs for developing the proposed course sequence (and minor); their support letters were critical to the success of our application for university-level approval.

Student interest survey

We conducted a brief quantitative survey involving over 1,200 undergraduate students enrolled in courses within the previously identified departments, asking about their level of interest in such a minor and the possibility of fulfilling education requirements for licensure to work in this area. On a 5-point scale, the median and mode response was 4 (somewhat high interest) to both questions and the means were 3.26 and 3.50 respectively; 76% of social work students surveyed favored this minor and 81% favored the opportunity to meet licensure education requirements. These results being supportive of the plan were included in our application for university-level approval of the proposed minor and courses.

State educational requirements

We then reviewed the state’s educational requirements for undergraduate and graduate level licensure as a chemical dependency counselor. In our state, similar to many other states (see https://www.addiction-counselors.com/), required educational areas include: Theories of Addiction (24 hours), Counseling Procedures & Strategies with Addicted Populations (30 hours), Group Process & Techniques Working with Addicted Populations (18 hours), Assessment & Diagnosis of Addiction (24 hours), Relationship Counseling with Addicted Populations (24 hours), Pharmacology (18 hours), Prevention Strategies (12 hours), Treatment Planning (18 hours), and Ethics (12 hours).

Course sequence “backward” design

Beginning with the state educational requirements, our own beliefs about essential content, and social work literature concerning desired learning outcomes, we worked backwards to aggregate elements into a reasonable course array. The technique we used involved a lot of Post-It® notes identifying each identified content element (color coded for required and desired contents). We arranged (and repeatedly rearranged) our notes within the framework of a four-course sequence; we eventually added a fifth course option to also achieve the state’s prevention practitioner certification.

Once we had assembled this complex puzzle into a satisfactory content array, we developed course syllabi to integrate the grouped content with current theory, evidence, and practices, as well as Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) competencies. This planning process allowed us to minimize over-duplication and curriculum gaps, as well as to ensure the content logically built between courses. Syllabus development, the college and university approval processes, and online course design were the most time- and effort-intensive tasks. Additionally, the resulting syllabi (available on request) were central to our application for program endorsement by the state’s licensure board; when approved, students will no longer need to have their coursework individually evaluated as they will be “covered” by a blanket, program-level endorsement. The resulting 14-week courses matched to our state’s educational requirements are presented in Table 1; additionally, the prevention certificate course includes Prevention Strategies (42 hours) and Ethics (3 hours).

Table 1. Four courses (45 hours each) matched to state educational requirements (180 hours)

Course Title	State Required Content Hours
Theories & Biological Basis of Substance Misuse	Theories of Addiction (24); Pharmacology (18); Prevention Strategies (3)
Screening, Assessment, & Treatment Planning for Substance Misuse	Counseling Procedures (1); Assessment & Diagnosis (24); Treatment Planning (18); Ethics (2)
Group, Family, & Relationship Approaches in Substance Misuse Intervention	Group Counseling (18); Relationship Counseling (24); Ethics (3)
Intervening with Individuals’ Substance Misuse	Counseling Procedures (30); Prevention Strategies (9); Ethics (6)

Instruction

The next challenge was to identify instructors who could deliver the content as designed, and to monitor for “drift” over time. Instructors in these courses include regular faculty, college staff, doctoral students, and community instructors who differ in their types of professional and educational experience related to substance misuse. In some cases, we needed to offer some training support to help instructors develop knowledge and competence to deliver specific content. Fortunately, multiple new instructional resources are emerging on the scene (e.g., Begun & Murray, 2020). In addition, each course has been designed as a fully online offering which provides a significant degree of stability across instructors and semesters because everyone is utilizing the same master course templates for syllabi, assignments, learning activities, learning material, and resources. This is important as our college offers the sequence on our main and four regional campuses, and now to our online MSW program students.

Monitoring

Each year, course evaluations and data concerning student learning outcomes are examined and the state’s educational requirements are reviewed for any changes that necessitate alterations to our master course templates.

Conclusions

In conclusion, these steps allow our undergraduate and graduate social work programs to offer students (regardless of their major) coursework to meet the educational requirements for licensure as a substance misuse counseling professional in our state and many other states with similar educational requirements. The sequence has contributed to a workforce development goal addressing substance misuse: one strategy identified in the social work grand challenge to reduce and prevent alcohol misuse and its consequences (Lundgren et al., 2018). When first designing the opportunity, we envisioned about 25 students per class as a cohort (25 students x 4 courses x 3 credit hours = 300 student enrollment hours). Instead, over just the past year, before offering the Intervening with Individuals’ Substance Misuse course, we have completed over 1,620 student enrollment hours in the course sequence; additionally, 122 students completed the 3-credit hour substance misuse prevention course. While the majority of students completing the substance misuse minor are social work majors, students from nursing, pharmaceutical sciences, biomedical sciences, human development and family science, public health, psychology, criminology, business, sociology, and dental hygiene have done so, as well. An added bonus is that these students have been exposed to this substance-related content within a social work framework, incorporating social work values, diversity, biopsychosocial and lifespan perspectives, and evidence-base/evidence-supported practices in screening, assessment, treatment, prevention, and recovery support. We believe that it provides a strong foundation for social work substance misuse practice and that the approach to developing such a sequence is both transferable and translatable for application in other programs around the nation.